


It Wasn't Paradise

by KLStarre



Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Genre: Ballet, Campaign 01 Season 02: Fantasy High Sophomore Year (Dimension 20), Gen, Healing, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Recovery, Trauma, dance, it's aelwyn you know the drill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-22
Updated: 2020-07-22
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:20:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25448266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KLStarre/pseuds/KLStarre
Summary: Aelwyn Abernant used to do ballet.
Relationships: Adaine Abernant & Aelwen Abernant, Aelwen Abernant & Jawbone O'Shaughnessey
Comments: 21
Kudos: 112





	It Wasn't Paradise

**Author's Note:**

> 1) Brennan confirmed Aelwyn's name was spelled Aelwyn, leave me alone AO3 tags  
> 2) I forgot that the Abernant home got burned down until I was 2/3 done with this and I refuse to change it  
> 3) This is loosely inspired by this beautiful comic (https://sofhtie.tumblr.com/post/624333016655855616/it-wasnt-paradise-but-it-was-home-i-have-many) and also by me and Nicki spiraling about ballet Aelwyn approximately once a fortnight

Aelwyn Abernant is mostly fine, these days. She lives in Mordred Manor, with her younger sister and Jawbone and a hundred other people, it feels like, sometimes, and she talks about her feelings when she absolutely has to and she doesn’t go to school and she even sleeps through the night, on good days. Mostly fine.

So, she says yes when Jawbone offers to go with her to the old Abernant home to collect any of the things she misses and can’t replace. Jawbone doesn’t ask what those things could be, and, if she were honest with him, which she sometimes is, these days, she doesn’t know. She asks him to stay outside, and she doesn’t know what she’s looking for as she climbs the empty stairs and walks down the empty hall and opens the door to her empty room.

It’s exactly as she left it, she thinks. She’s not quite sure. Memories are fuzzy. But the bed is made and the desk is clean, a stack of textbooks on one side and a smaller stack of paper on the other. She doesn’t need any of that. Her magic has been stronger than what was in her books for a long, long time, and she never wrote anything important down if she could help it. Used to be, she could just remember anything she needed to remember.

Aelwyn moves to her closet, footsteps muffled on dusty carpet. It’s just clothes, mostly, nothing important. It’s hard to think of anything that could be important enough to be worth bringing away from here, making Adaine look at, and she regrets coming – _stupid, should have known better, think things through_ – until she goes to turn away and catches a glimpse of, on the upper shelf, a white mesh bag.

She’s just barely tall enough to pull it down without jumping, and the cardigan that had been on top of it falls, too, with a quiet thump, but she doesn’t notice. The pointe shoes are heavy, heavier than she remembers. Most things are heavier than she remembers. She holds them reverently, and she doesn’t think, and she looks at the red streaks on the ribbons, and she clutches them to her chest, and the toes are solid wood, not meant to be held, and she thinks maybe if she presses them against herself hard enough that she’ll absorb them and they’ll be part of her again.

There are other things, probably, that she should bring with her, but she has no idea what they could possibly be and she thinks if she stays in this house one more minute she’ll explode.

Aelwyn runs down the stairs and Jawbone is waiting for her and she doesn’t say anything in the car ride back to Mordred Manor and he doesn’t ask.

They get back, and Aelwyn walks up to her room, back in enough control to regret showing that she was upset. Adaine is out. Aelwyn sits on the floor.

She _shouldn’t_. She _knows_ she shouldn’t. Ballet had never been kind to her. She’d never been _quite_ good enough, never been _quite_ in control enough, never been _quite_ hungry enough or desperate enough or whatever it was that let some girls hold their stomachs in and keep their hips down and do fouetté after fouetté after fouetté.

She should put tights on, at the very least, but she hadn’t brought tights from home. Just ten minutes, she tells herself, just one warmup. The toepads fit like they always did – not quite right, like there’s no way to tell if they’re on the correct way – and she pushes her right foot into the shoe and it fits like it always did, too. Her fingers tie the ribbons with the kind of instinct that does her so much good in her magic and so little good here. Left foot follows, easy, painful. It’s been so long, and these are new shoes, too, barely broken in.

The bunkbed is convenient for this, Aelwyn thinks, as she stands up and rests her hand on it, just her fingertips. She doesn’t need more support than that, or, at least, she _shouldn’t_ need more support than that. Easy start. Pliés.

Down, up. Down, up. Just to get warmed up. Her thighs shake and she ignores them. She’s just going to get warmed up, and then she’ll take the shoes off and, she doesn’t know, give them to Jawbone, maybe. Already, she can feel the backs of the shoes cutting into her heels, and it’s impossible to tell if it’ll blister or it it’ll bleed and she’ll have to painstakingly clean the blood off the satin.

It’s easier to ignore the pain than it used to be, and she tries not to think about why that might be.

After pliés, she moves on to relevés, nice and easy, leaning on the bed maybe more than she should – _stupid, let go, try harder, you shouldn’t need the support_ – and then she pops into a passé and lets go of the bed and _holds_ it. Seconds go by, and she’s shaky and her technique is bad, but she _holds_ it.

She stares forward and she does not think about the nights after her parents went to bed when she would put her pointe shoes on and practice balance for hours until she could stay up forever. She does not think about the way it felt kind of like flying, before she was even close to learning the magic of real flight, and she does not think about how it felt the day she went to class and the teacher looked at her balance and said “Look, class, everyone should try to be like Miss Abernant here.”

She comes down from the balance quietly. Noise is permitted in this house, even welcomed, but old habits die hard.

Adaine finds her practicing bourrées, back and forth across the room, toes fully numb, an hour later. Aelwyn doesn’t register her presence until she speaks.

“What are you _doing_?” comes the voice from the doorway, and Aelwyn looks, sees Adaine in her stupid jacket with her frog on her shoulder and comes down from en pointe with a thud.

“Nothing.” She’s proud of how level her voice is.

“Jawbone’s worried about you,” Adaine says, coming inside and tossing her backpack on the bottom bunk. It had belonged to her for a year before they’d built Aelwyn’s on top.

“Jawbone’s always worried about me.” Aelwyn’s feet are throbbing, now that she’s being distracted, and she can feel the slow trickle that makes it very clear that she is bleeding, not blistering.

“More than usual.”

“Wow, can’t _imagine_ why.” The moment she’d stopped moving, the world had come crashing down around her. There’s no fucking point to this, anyway, and her stupid feet hurt, and she can’t fucking believe that she only things from her _home_ that she cares enough about to think of are these stupid fucking shoes. She isn’t even _good_ at it.

 _Fuck_ , she’s crying. She turns away from Adaine and Adaine, who is a good sister despite what Aelwyn deserves, doesn’t point it out.

“I always thought you hated ballet,” she says, instead, which is a neutral topic but also isn’t, really.

“That was _you_ ,” Aelwyn responds, facing the wall. After a second, she starts going through pliés again.

“Obviously. They couldn’t make me go. But you always – ” Adaine cuts off with the hesitation she always cuts off with when discussing Aelwyn and home.

“What?”

“You always seemed so sad when you got back from class.”

Aelwyn doesn’t like that, doesn’t like that Adaine had paid that much attention to her, doesn’t like that what she’d felt had been that obvious. But it’s too late to be upset about it, she supposes. “Yeah. I was sad to be _back._ ”

That gets her silence. Which is fair. There isn’t much to say.

Eventually, as she’s beginning her ronde de jambes, Adaine says, “I promised I’d meet Riz to work on a project, so I have to go. Call me if you need anything?”

Adaine won’t leave until she responds, Aelwyn knows from past experience, so she says, “I will,” even though they both know full well that she won’t.

Adaine leaves again, and Aelwyn wants to return to her bourrées, but doesn’t. Instead she finds herself sitting on Adaine’s bottom bunk, unable to get up and keep moving and equally unable to untie the ribbons and take off the shoes and move the fuck on with her life.

She doesn’t know how much time has passed when she hears the knock on the door. Everyone is very careful to knock, here, which is…weird. “Come in,” she says, and the door swings open. It’s Jawbone, of course. _Fuck_. She doesn’t want him to see her like this.

“Hey, kid,” he says, not moving from the doorway, and she wishes for once he weren’t so fucking perfect so she’d have an excuse to get mad or yell at him to leave or…she doesn’t know. Ignore him. Her knees hurt.

“Hey.” Her voice is quiet.

“Can I come over there?”

Aelwyn wants to say no. She just wants to be _left alone_. But she nods. Jawbone walks over and sits next to her on the bed, close enough that she can lean into him if she wants to but far enough that he’s not in her space. She doesn’t lean into him – her back is still perfectly straight, ribcage closed, shoulder blades down, even though she’s shaking a little bit from the exertion.

“You used to be a dancer?”

Aelwyn looks down at her feet, flexes them, points them. “Yeah.” _Used to_ feels wrong, but it’s also been a year. And her hips hurt.

“Do you miss it?”

“What do _you_ think?” She’s still vicious, sometimes, and she doesn’t always feel bad about it.

“I think it’s good for you to say what you’re feeling, not for me to –”

“ _Alright_. Yeah, I miss it. It was the only good thing in my stupid life.”

“You have other good things now.”

Yeah. She does. She has a top bunk and new books on magic and weird family movie nights and a text chain with Riz that’s exclusively telling each other to go to bed at three in the morning and music that she’s allowed to play out loud. But she also has a yearning in the pit of her stomach for something that’s beautiful and that hurts and that pulls everything back together again. She doesn’t respond.

“We could find you classes, if you wanted.”

Aelwyn isn’t looking at Jawbone but she can feel his eyes on her and hear the worry in his voice and she says “ _No,_ ” immediately, without even thinking. Which. She has never wanted anything more than for Jawbone to find her ballet classes. If she were capable of crying in front of other people, she’d cry at the thought. But also…her feet are bleeding and her back hurts and she thinks maybe there’s something to be said for taking a break from beating her body into submission. “No.”

“Alright, kid. Shall we get those off ‘a ya?”

Her hands are shaky as she reaches down to undo the ribbon, and eventually she has to turn, put her feet on Jawbone’s lap, let him carefully, gently untie them and then pry them off her feet. She stretches her toes and they crack, each one. It feels like something is being ripped out of her and it’s all she can do to not reach out for it, beg for it back. Jawbone places the shoes on his other side, and, after a long second, Aelwyn curls up against him. He’s so warm. So sturdy.

“It was all I had,” she whispers.

“I know,” he says, and she can feel his voice vibrate through him. “But it’s not anymore.”


End file.
